Flexing his muscles: David Green is determined to put an end to the famous Private Eye nickname the 'Serious Farce Office'

You might say it has been a long time coming, but the decision of David Green – the director of the Serious Fraud Office – to haul in the former Barclays top brass for questioning under caution marks the boldest move so far to bring to justice bankers at the heart of the financial crisis.

Green and the SFO have been engaged in a long-running investigation into alleged corrupt arrangements made when Barclays turned its back on a government bailout in the autumn of 2008 and raised funds in Qatar.

We should not be entirely surprised by Green’s willingness to question some of the biggest names in finance including former Barclays chief executives John Varley and Bob Diamond, who held the top posts at the bank when the fund-raising took place. Others involved are thought to include Roger Jenkins (the former head of the bank’s tax business) and former finance director Chris Lucas.

In a recent interview, in his capacious office overlooking Trafalgar Square, Green noted that a lot of the conduct by bankers ‘may not necessarily have involved dishonesty. It may have involved negligence. It may have involved recklessness. I need dishonest generally speaking.’

‘I have to follow the evidence, there’s no shortcut to that,’ Green says.

The 60-year-old Cambridge-educated QC resides in an office reminiscent of a Hollywood private-eye set. The desk is strewn with souvenirs that include a magnifying glass, a used cartridge and a strong pair of binoculars – all the more helpful for bringing rogue financiers to justice.

‘In order to make a bank or a company liable for the criminal act of its employees – if they were criminal – we have to show complicity in that criminality at board level; that the controlling mind of the company or bank was complicit.

That’s often not very easy because the email trail tends to dry up at a certain level,’ he notes with an air of scepticism.

The exception he cites is Section 7 of the Bribery Act which makes a company and its controllers liable ‘for acts of bribery by its employees’ – which might have provided a gateway for the SFO to talk to the former Barclays officials.

But he would like the law extended to make a company ‘liable for acts of financial crime committed by its employees’.

When Green arrived at the SFO two years ago morale was at a low point. The organisation had been skewered by the National Audit Office over its expenses and humiliated over the bungled arrest of the Tchenguiz property tycoons, who are seeking £200m in damages.

‘We had some legacy issues to deal with,’ Green says, but he believes the SFO now is ‘unrecognisable from the organisation it was two years ago’.

Much of Green’s current work focuses on Britain’s efforts to stamp out corporate corruption. ‘Bribery has a massively corrosive effect particularly in relation to foreign contracts because usually it’s fairly distasteful regimes and countries that are in receipt of bribes, and the people who pay at the end of the day are the poorest,’ he says.

‘We’ve announced we are pursuing an investigation into Rolls-Royce, that’s going nicely,’ he adds, disarmingly.

Of Britain’s pharmaceutical champion GlaxoSmithKline – the subject of bribery allegations from China to Poland and the Middle East – all he will say is: ‘We are aware of the situation.’ He could proceed against GSK only with ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that the conduct may involve an offence of serious or complex fraud, including bribery’.

Green’s career, after reading history at Cambridge, took him to the Defence Intelligence Staff where he gained experience of the developing world working on ‘Soviet arms traffic into black Africa’. From there he served as a barrister for a quarter of a century, before moving to the Revenue & Customs prosecutions office for several years.

His choice of necktie, with a viper crawling up it, suggests he receives some satisfaction from curtailing the activities of financial wrongdoers. One of the great frustrations in his present job is the role of what he calls ‘ritzy’ City law firms in keeping investigators and prosecutors at bay.

‘My beef is where the company we want to investigate will call in their lawyers who will do the first interviews with all the employees concerned and write the first report.

‘As in any crime, or suspected crime, what people say first is really important. We have had a number of cases where privilege has been claimed on the witnesses’ first accounts. I don’t understand how those accounts can actually justify privilege,’ he says.

In his view, most internal inquiries ‘churn up the ground’ making it more difficult for the regulators and the SFO.

So what does he think of the Bank of England’s decision to call in Lord Grabiner and City lawyers Travers Smith to look at the role of its staff in foreign exchange manipulation? ‘I don’t complain about them launching an investigation.

‘It’s just a certain privilege on the first witness statements from the most important witnesses. That, I think, is a bizarre thing to do.’

As a former intelligence analyst, Green believes such data has a role in fraud inquiries. ‘We are entitled to access intelligence data and material in accordance with the law. I couldn’t go further than that.

‘The use of modern policing methods would allow us to investigate crime in action, as it actually is happening now. And that’s a very significant change for the SFO.’

With a combination of bribery cases and wrongdoing in the banking sector, including the cases surrounding the fixing of Libor, the SFO has plenty to sink its teeth into at present.

‘Awaiting trial we have got 11 cases involving 32 defendants. So there is an enormous amount in the pipeline,’ Green says.

He has recruited new senior staff, including former City lawyers, and clearly is determined to put an end to the famous Private Eye nickname the ‘Serious Farce Office’. But there is still a long way to go.